It''s Celebration Time!

Indeed! The CI Silver Club is the celebration of the achievements of the channel partners of the country. Several magazines including our own flagship brand Dataquest keep celebrating the accomplishments of the IT industry year after year. However, these general analyses and rankings speak very little about the channel which makes the dreams of vendors and manufacturers come true by reaching out to end-users every nook and corner of the country.

We wanted to overcome this aberration in IT journalism. So when we first published "The Big Five Club" last year, we received interesting feedback from channel partners. Some of the statements went like this: "Every one knows the top five distributors. So, what is new in your story on the Big Five Club?"; "Why restrict the Club to only five when channel partners number in thousands?"; and "Are you not limiting the limelight to only a few companies?"

All very valid observations and we saw merit in each of these statements. Yes, everyone knew the big five distributors. But the "newness" that we tried to provide last year was to rank them for the first time in the channel history and provide detailed information about them to a wider base of channel partners.

Certainly, why restrict the Club to only five when several other achievers among channel partners wait in the wings with their success stories? The achievements of these partners equally deserved to be highlighted.

Yes, the result of reacting positively to the channel pulse is what you see in this issue: "The CI Silver Club" that eclipses last year’s "Big Five Club". Members of the CI Silver Club have made it to the elite first time-ever ranking of channel partners based on their agency revenue for 1999-00.

The CI Silver Club goes several steps ahead of the Big Five Club. If the latter represented only the top five distributors of the country, the CI Silver Club highlights 11 pure distributors, 12 systems integrators-cum-resellers and two pure systems integrators.

We have not stopped at just ranking channel partners based on their revenue but have done value-addition in terms of analyzing the individual growth of companies vis-à-vis the growth of the Silver Club. We have looked at the usage of technology and the lack of it by channel partners to enhance their business. We have discussed in detail how promotions and schemes have helped channel partners to push sales.

From listing top five distributors, we have moved to ranking the first 25 channel partners. We have also listed those who are in the reckoning. These companies are only in the reckoning and could not make it to the Club because their audited revenue figures could not reach us on time. Others did not want to give figures at all because their plan is to first grow to a certain size to make it directly to the top ten in the Silver Club.

Our mission is very simple. Through the CI Silver Club we want to take the channel community yet another plane higher where they feel inspired to reach even greater heights by learning from the attainments of those who have made it to the Club.